my attempts at poetry and journaling. I enjoy both, as well as learning how to be a mom and balance everything in my life. I love my life but I sometimes feel hopelessly inadequate.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Poetry Challenge #24: Three-Legged Chair Poem

Before we get started this week, please do check out last week's tributes to the tragedy and heroic efforts we've witnessed in Haiti. You can read them here.

This week's challenge is once again borrowed from a terrific website, ReadWritePoem. They have offered up the picture to the right of this paragraph and encouraged their readers to devise a poem trying to explain or describe what is happening here. Why is the figure wearing a hood? How did the chair get there? Why is it broken? Why is the figure contemplating the chair? What is holding the chair up? You can answer any, all, or none of these questions, just use the picture as your inspiration this week.

Here is my poem:

Standing Still

Sometimes silence is the loudest sound.This land has given up every traceof life, save what I am clinging todeep within myself.

The same could be saidfor certain human spirits.Grief, disability, mental strugglemay be their “missing leg,”yet they remain standingin spite of all that would see them fall.

Merely looking at this odditygives me hope, regardlessof my own local tragedies.It is almost as if someone placed it herejust for me to stumble upon,a small signthat all will be right with the worldif I can hang on.

So, take a look, have a think, and please share what you come up with here!

Cicely--that poem is an example of why I really appreciate your contributions here. I took many more words to try to encapsulate what I saw in the picture and you were able to distill yours down to an efficient haiku. 1,000 points for your excellent economy.

kristine - i was on here last night in the wee hours when i (again) couldn't sleep & came up *completely* empty handed... i may have to wait for the next challenge... i had some sort of variation of Hebrews 11 going around in my mind, but i went & tried to work on it & came up dry. :( Boooo.

Many thanks, Cicely. I really must remember to try and post before all wits leave me, around 9pm of late. I have the best intentions of laying down a post today at some point. Maybe I'll have to start doing them in the afternoon?? :)

Also, I deleted that spam-post. At least I couldn't read most of it, since it was not written in English characters. :)